January 23, 2012

Yea, I was that kid. When asked by my grade school teacher to cite an example of a hexagon I told her, "Well Mrs. Goldwink, the first illustration to come to mind is that of the Northern Pole of Saturn", and she was all like, "Uhh...sure...How about you Julie?", and then I quietly raged inside as I was looked over for being above average and Julie responded by asking "how many sides are in a hexagon again?" True story; At least that's the way I remember it. Anyways, the North Pole thing is true. If you aren't familiar with Saturn, it's a giant ball of gas out in space that circles the same star that we do. It's about 100 times the size of Earth and has rings of composed of rock and ice chunks at its equator. It also has a whopping 62 known moons with the largest one, Titan, being larger than the planet mercury. It also has this incredible persisting hexagonal wave pattern in its North Pole. Since the planet is primarily gas with a solid inner core, the outside area acts as a fluid; so sustaining this pattern is quite remarkable and its origin is still up for debate. Each side of the hexagon is larger than the diameter of the earth and the whole thing rotates completely around in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Incredibly, this is the same period made by the radio emissions from the planet, and it's assumed that this is the period of rotation of the inner core. I've included a video of the hexagon being replicated in a laboratory. It's pretty amazing to see how geometric shapes pop up everywhere in nature and how the universe is so elegantly bound in mathematics.